With the current global pandemic spreading, yesterday, BT Openreach announced it’ s closed its overseas call centre due to a lock-down in India, which has restricted all orders and faults to key critical services until at least 1 June.

BT Openreach communications update can be viewed here.

The news means that no new business orders will be looked at until this time, including PSTN, ADSL, FTTC, FTTP and Ethernet where any visit to the site is required. Self-install is still available, but even these could be restricted if supplier subsequently deems a site visit would be still needed.

Engineers will also not be visiting any customer sites. Already we are experiencing errors when trying to place your orders onto the portal which is creating a problem, meaning we may need to look at stalling customer orders.

More advice will be released as we have news.

The situation is the same for faults. Openreach will only be dealing with critical service faults that fall into the criteria attached, and this will remain the case for the foreseeable future. Please also note that diverts are affected on PSTN services too as they are reliant on the offshore service centre (ISDN is OK for the moment).

Please also be aware that our engineers are following BT Openreach guidelines and are prioritising the critical jobs and suspending the day-to-day site visits.

Things are changing daily, and we will aim to provide more detail as we have it, including answers to the questions you’ll no doubt have after reading this.

As soon as we have more relevant information from our carrier partners, we’ll share that with you.